Posts Categorized: Technical Blog

In past few days I had two incidents and an outage, for just a few minutes. However, outage in a production environment is related to cost relatively and strictly. The server that had outage was because of failing over and then failing back about 4 to 5 times in 15 minutes. I was holding pager,…

In my last blog post I mentioned that SaltStack is a fully featured configuration management solution, but we never looked into using the tool in that way. Today we will begin to explore some basic examples of configuration management with SaltStack. We will look at two aspects of configuration management, installing a package, and will…

There was a discrepancy in the failgroups of couple of ASM disks in Exadata. In Exadata, the cell name corresponds to the failgroup name. But there were couple of disks with different failgroup names. Using the following plan to rectify the issue online without any downtime:

One of the well-known best practices for HDFS is to store data in few large files, rather than a large number of small ones. There are a few problems related to using many small files but the ultimate HDFS killer is that the memory consumption on the name node is proportional to the number of…

Yesterday, Cloudera released the score reports for their Data Science Challenge 2014 and I was really ecstatic when I received mine with a “PASS” score! This was a real challenge for me and I had to put a LOT of effort into it, but it paid off in the end! Note: I won’t bother you…

The idea of this blog post is to describe what the delayed durability feature is in SQL Server 2014 and to describe a use case from an application development perspective. With every new SQL Server release we get a bunch of new features and delayed durability of transactions really caught my attention. Most of the…

Stat command in Linux can be used to display a file or a file system status. I came across an issue in RHEL4 where a file’s ‘Change time’ is far ahead than the ‘Modification time’ without a change in uid, gid and mode. # stat /etc/php.ini File: `/etc/php.ini’ Size: 45809 Blocks: 96 IO Block: 4096…

Recently I worked on a issue where a third-party application was failing during the installation. Below was the error returned by the Application. Lock request time out period exceeded. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 1222) The application was failing while it was trying to create a database. The application seemed to have a default timeout setting…

As a DBA, it is common to get a request to run scripts against production databases. However, there can be environments where there are multiple databases on same instance, where the script needs to be run against. I have seen a environment where there were 50+ databases which have same schema with different data, and…

As you might already know, I come up with my fair share of toy web applications. Once created, I typically throw them on my server for a few weeks but, as the resources of good ol’ Gilgamesh are limited, they eventually have to be turned off to make room for the next wave of shiny…